Staff Thermal Engineer

At Relativity Space, we have two audacious goals: to build the next great commercial launch company with Terran R and to become America's leading force in additive manufacturing innovation. Both contribute to our long-term vision of creating humanity’s industrial base on Mars, paving the way for interplanetary life to expand the possibilities of the human experience. This journey begins right here on Earth – where we design, build, and fly rockets to deliver customer payloads to orbit. Terran R, our medium-to-heavy lift reusable rocket, fulfills the growing demand for launch capacity, thanks to our iterative approach that accelerates design, testing, and development while minimizing costs. While our groundbreaking research and development in 3D printing pushes the boundaries of large-scale additive manufacturing.

Your journey with us is more than just a job – it’s an opportunity to shape the future of aerospace technology, additive manufacturing, and the human experience alongside a community of passionate, creative individuals. Join us on this extraordinary journey, as we work together to transform our vision into reality.

About the Team:

Relativity’s Integrated Performance teams ensure that our products work across all systems and disciplines, from trajectory design to aerodynamics to reliability analysis and beyond. Our groups size the Terran R rocket, design its missions for customer success, reliability, and reusability, and ensure that every system on the rocket and ground is engineered correctly for the demanding environments of launch and entry. Recently, we completed the preliminary design and analysis of Terran R including Relativity’s first-ever work on launch vehicle reusability, spanning advanced trajectory simulations, wind tunnel testing, and structures analysis, among many other projects.

The Thermal team is responsible for predicting temperatures and designing thermal architectures for structures, fluids, components, and avionics on reusable launch vehicles. With a strong grasp of thermodynamics and all types of heat transfer, the team addresses a vast amount of thermal challenges across all forms of ground use and flight phases. Leveraging first principle hand calculations, reduced order modeling, as well as detailed thermal modeling, the team is able to drive cross disciplinary vehicle designs. Our collaboration with hardware engineers and all other teams further enables us to overcome design and integration hurdles, ensuring a seamless and efficient development process from concept and through launch.

About the Role:

• Drive the architecture, sizing, and development of thermal systems like insulation, heaters, thermal protection, and environmental conditioning in collaboration with peer technical teams
• Build, execute, and validate thermal analyses at the component, sub-system, and vehicle level, including relevant tool development and automation
• Direct design and development engineers in the successful application of thermal sciences to achieve system and component requirements
• Develop and execute tests to support thermal systems development and qualification, including hands-on work like test article integration, instrumentation setup, and data processing
• Support vehicle and engine thermal system development and stage testing as well as flight operations

About You:

• Undergraduate degree in engineering or related field
• 8+ years experience in thermal analysis across 1 full product lifecycle
• Proficiency in component and system level thermal and fluids analysis, using relevant toolsets like Sinda/Fluint/Thermal Desktop or other commercial FEM/FDM/FVM solvers
• Experience in an analysis role on an integrated vehicle program
• Hands-on experience with writing test plans and performing testing, instrumentation, and data analysis at the component and system level
• Experience solving complex problems on integrated vehicles with design teams
• Experience with an engineering scripting language like MATLAB or Python

Nice to haves but not required:

• Graduate degree in engineering or related field
• 12+ years experience in thermal analysis across 2 or more full product lifecycles
• Familiarity with liquid rocket stage, engine architecture, and operations
• Understanding of aerodynamics and external flight related heating
• Experience with launch vehicle thermal protection system materials and thermal protection system sizing
• Experience with start to finish design cycles of multiple vehicles

At Relativity Space, we are committed to transparency and fairness in our compensation practices. Actual compensation will be determined based on experience, qualifications, and other job-related factors.

Compensation is only one part of our total rewards package. Relativity Space offers competitive salary and equity, a generous PTO and sick leave policy, parental leave, an annual learning and development stipend, and more! To see some of the benefits & perks we offer, please visit here.

Hiring Range:$155,000—$197,000 USD

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.